Sen Nie

Nan Wang, Xuezhi Wen, Dalin Zhang et al.

APT detection is difficult to detect due to the long-term latency, covert and slow multistage attack patterns of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). To tackle these issues, we propose TBDetector, a transformer-based advanced persistent threat detection method for APT attack detection. Considering that provenance graphs provide rich historical information and have the powerful attacks historic correlation ability to identify anomalous activities, TBDetector employs provenance analysis for APT detection, which summarizes long-running system execution with space efficiency and utilizes transformer with self-attention based encoder-decoder to extract long-term contextual features of system states to detect slow-acting attacks. Furthermore, we further introduce anomaly scores to investigate the anomaly of different system states, where each state is calculated with an anomaly score corresponding to its similarity score and isolation score. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have conducted experiments on five public datasets, i.e., streamspot, cadets, shellshock, clearscope, and wget_baseline. Experimental results and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods have exhibited better performance of our proposed method.

Yue Xiao, Ling Jiang, Sen Nie et al.

Provenance-based Intrusion Detection Systems (PIDSes) have been widely used to detect Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Although many studies achieve high performance in the evaluations of their original papers, their performance in industrial scenarios remains unclear. To fill this gap, we conduct the first systematic evaluation and analysis of PIDSes in industrial scenarios. We first analyze the differences between the data from DARPA datasets and that collected in industrial scenarios, identifying three main new characteristics in industry: heterogeneous multi-source inputs, more powerful attackers, and increasing benign activity complexity. We then build several datasets to evaluate five state-of-the-art PIDSes. The evaluation results reveal challenges for existing PIDSes, including poor portability across different hosts and platforms, low detection performance against real-world attacks, and high false positive rates with ever-changing benign activities. Based on the evaluation results and our industrial practices, we provide several insights to solve or explain the above problems. For example, we propose a method to mitigate the high false positives, which reduces manual effort by 2/3. Finally, we propose several research suggestions to improve PIDSes.

Pengfei Jing, Mengyun Tang, Xiaorong Shi et al.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding their capabilities and limitations across various applications, including natural language processing and code generation. Existing benchmarks like MMLU, C-Eval, and HumanEval assess general LLM performance but lack focus on specific expert domains such as cybersecurity. Previous attempts to create cybersecurity datasets have faced limitations, including insufficient data volume and a reliance on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). To address these gaps, we propose SecBench, a multi-dimensional benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate LLMs in the cybersecurity domain. SecBench includes questions in various formats (MCQs and short-answer questions (SAQs)), at different capability levels (Knowledge Retention and Logical Reasoning), in multiple languages (Chinese and English), and across various sub-domains. The dataset was constructed by collecting high-quality data from open sources and organizing a Cybersecurity Question Design Contest, resulting in 44,823 MCQs and 3,087 SAQs. Particularly, we used the powerful while cost-effective LLMs to (1). label the data and (2). constructing a grading agent for automatic evaluation of SAQs. Benchmarking results on 16 SOTA LLMs demonstrate the usability of SecBench, which is arguably the largest and most comprehensive benchmark dataset for LLMs in cybersecurity. More information about SecBench can be found at our website, and the dataset can be accessed via the artifact link.

Sen Nie, Jie Zhang, Zhuo Wang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs). While test-time defenses are promising, existing methods fail to provide sufficient robustness against strong attacks and are often hampered by high inference latency and task-specific applicability. To address these limitations, we start by investigating the intrinsic properties of AEs, which reveals that AEs exhibit severe feature inconsistency under progressive frequency attenuation. We further attribute this to the model's inherent spectral bias. Leveraging this insight, we propose an efficient test-time defense named Contrastive Spectral Rectification (CSR). CSR optimizes a rectification perturbation to realign the input with the natural manifold under a spectral-guided contrastive objective, which is applied input-adaptively. Extensive experiments across 16 classification benchmarks demonstrate that CSR outperforms the SOTA by an average of 18.1% against strong AutoAttack with modest inference overhead. Furthermore, CSR exhibits broad applicability across diverse visual tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Summu77/CSR.

Sen Nie, Jie Zhang, Jianxin Yan et al.

Adversarial attacks have evolved from simply disrupting predictions on conventional task-specific models to the more complex goal of manipulating image semantics on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, existing methods struggle with controllability and fail to precisely manipulate the semantics of specific concepts in the image. We attribute this limitation to semantic entanglement in the patch-token representations on which adversarial attacks typically operate: global context aggregated by self-attention in the vision encoder dominates individual patch features, making them unreliable handles for precise local semantic manipulation. Our systematic investigation reveals a key insight: value features (V) computed within the transformer attention block serve as much more precise handles for manipulation. We show that V suppresses global-context channels, allowing it to retain high-entropy, disentangled local semantic information. Building on this discovery, we propose V-Attack, a novel method designed for precise local semantic attacks. V-Attack targets the value features and introduces two core components: (1) a Self-Value Enhancement module to refine V's intrinsic semantic richness, and (2) a Text-Guided Value Manipulation module that leverages text prompts to locate source concept and optimize it toward a target concept. By bypassing the entangled patch features, V-Attack achieves highly effective semantic control. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLMs, including LLaVA, InternVL, DeepseekVL and GPT-4o, show that V-Attack improves the attack success rate by an average of 36% over state-of-the-art methods, exposing critical vulnerabilities in modern visual-language understanding. Our code and data are available https://github.com/Summu77/V-Attack.

Sen Nie, Zhuo Wang, Xinxin Wang et al.

Recent studies emphasize the crucial role of data augmentation in enhancing the performance of object detection models. However,existing methodologies often struggle to effectively harmonize dataset diversity with semantic coordination.To bridge this gap, we introduce an innovative augmentation technique leveraging pre-trained conditional diffusion models to mediate this balance. Our approach encompasses the development of a Category Affinity Matrix, meticulously designed to enhance dataset diversity, and a Surrounding Region Alignment strategy, which ensures the preservation of semantic coordination in the augmented images. Extensive experimental evaluations confirm the efficacy of our method in enriching dataset diversity while seamlessly maintaining semantic coordination. Our method yields substantial average improvements of +1.4AP, +0.9AP, and +3.4AP over existing alternatives on three distinct object detection models, respectively.

Sen Nie, Jie Zhang, Zhongqi Wang et al.

Achieving adversarial robustness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inevitably compromises accuracy on clean data, presenting a long-standing and challenging trade-off. In this work, we revisit this trade-off by investigating a fundamental question: What makes VLMs robust? Through a detailed analysis of adversarially fine-tuned models, we examine how robustness mechanisms function internally and how they interact with clean accuracy. Our analysis reveals that adversarial robustness is not uniformly distributed across network depth. Instead, unexpectedly, it is primarily localized within the shallow layers, driven by a low-frequency spectral bias and input-insensitive attention patterns. Meanwhile, updates to the deep layers tend to undermine both clean accuracy and robust generalization. Motivated by these insights, we propose Adversarial Robustness Adaptation (R-Adapt), a simple yet effective framework that freezes all pre-trained weights and introduces minimal, insight-driven adaptations only in the initial layers. This design achieves an exceptional balance between adversarial robustness and clean accuracy. R-Adapt further supports training-free, model-guided, and data-driven paradigms, offering flexible pathways to seamlessly equip standard models with robustness. Extensive evaluations on 18 datasets and diverse tasks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance under various attacks. Notably, R-Adapt generalizes efficiently to large vision-language models (e.g., LLaVA and Qwen-VL) to enhance their robustness. Our project page is available at https://summu77.github.io/R-Adapt.

Ang Jia, Ming Fan, Wuxia Jin et al.

Binary similarity analysis is critical to many code-reuse-related issues and "1-to-1" mechanism is widely applied, where one function in a binary file is matched against one function in a source file or binary file. However, we discover that function mapping is a more complex problem of "1-to-n" or even "n-to-n" due to the existence of function inlining. In this paper, we investigate the effect of function inlining on binary similarity analysis. We first construct 4 inlining-oriented datasets for four similarity analysis tasks, including code search, OSS reuse detection, vulnerability detection, and patch presence test. Then, we further study the extent of function inlining, the performance of existing works under function inlining, and the effectiveness of existing inlining-simulation strategies. Results show that the proportion of function inlining can reach nearly 70%, while most existing works neglect it and use "1-to-1" mechanism. The mismatches cause a 30% loss in performance during code search and a 40% loss during vulnerability detection. Moreover, two existing inlining-simulation strategies can only recover 60% of the inlined functions. We discover that inlining is usually cumulative when optimization increases. Conditional inlining and incremental inlining are suggested to design low-cost and high-coverage inlining-simulation strategies.